


if you come around again

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: 5 Things, 5 Times, Comics/Movie Crossover, F/M, Marvel Comics - Freeform, Red Room, Secret Messages, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5661859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things left unspoken, but not unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you come around again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AverageBunny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AverageBunny/gifts).



> Now available in Chinese, courtesy of Lexie: http://will-loves-riley.lofter.com/post/1d46ff6f_b3806f7

i

After their lovemaking winds down—after they have broken a lamp and nearly ripped apart their temporary base to boot—Natalia drifts into sleep almost immediately. She curls her arms around the pillow, an unconscious movement that sets her apart from many of her peers, who grew into women unable to break the habits the Red Room had pounded into them. Her skin hardly holds markings for long anyway, but the fact that she’s freed herself from the lifetime of bruised wrists still impresses him.

She’s always impressed him. Breaking free, however superficially, is a luxury he’s never been able to afford—or thought to, before her.

The bed is wide and comfortable, a far cry from the sleeping arrangements back at the facility. There’s no need to press against each other, but he does anyway, resting his bare legs flush against hers. His spine arches into a slight fetal position where hers is ramrod straight, in spite of her sleep—the ideal soldier, he thinks. Or spy, rather, as even her unconscious body doesn’t betray a single thought or feeling that courses under her skin.

He uses the arc of space between his chest and her back as an opportunity to touch her again, a quiet moment of prayer in the only temple he can remember caring to enter. The tips of his fingers ghost over her bones and muscles, flesh against flesh. All those smooth, hard lines comprise Natalia in a way that her other instructors could never understand, let alone worship like this. They still think this mission has been assigned to two ruthlessly loyal, eternally unquestioning assets.

Without deciding to, his hand begins tracing words, first in Cyrillic script and then Roman letters as he realizes just what he’s doing. _My Natalia_ , he scrawls, with a cursive flourish he doesn’t think the Soviets ever taught him. _Teach me to run away, take me with you when you go_.

She doesn’t wake, but her back relaxes just enough for him to curl bodily around her.

 

ii

With the extraction rendezvous hours away instead of a matter of minutes, Natalia remains in the shower longer than strictly necessary, enjoying the hot water and gentle pressure. The tiled room remains warm from the heat of her shower minutes after she turns the water off, and Natalia lets the steam twist along her bare skin, leaving pinpricks of gooseflesh in its wake.

The bathroom door is closed, but she can hear the Winter Soldier moving about, presumably rearranging the bedroom to hide traces of their vigorous but unsanctioned activities the night before. Even in the heat of their passion, both had been careful to avoid leaving any visible traces on one another, but she can still feel the specter of his hands on her body, his palms skimming her hips, his lips idling over her breasts and between her thighs.

She has learned and relearned throughout her life how to shed and shift her skin, chameleon-like, as thoughtlessly and as often as breathing. Anything that lingers now, even if it’s only in her mind, is meant to be treasured.

Natalia allows herself another moment of sensory indulgence, then wraps a towel around her torso and another around her hair. The mirror is too fogged to be useful, but she’s reluctant to open the door even a crack. She tugs the smaller towel off of her head, drying as she goes, and raises it to the blurred glass.

Something about the unspoiled serenity of the condensation gives her pause, though, and she decides to let it dissipate a bit more on its own. Instead, she brings her finger to the mirror and gently begins to trace what becomes, without any real intent, a cardioid, with plump sides and a deep indent on the top. She adds a point to the bottom, then a cartoonish arrow tip and fletching sticking out of opposite sides of the shape.

The familiarity of the picture takes a moment to settle, but then Natalia remembers her detailed education on American schoolgirls—how to ape and emulate them, how to inhabit their limited imaginations and soft lives. The motif calls for initials in its center, and she obliges with an _N.A.R._ , followed by a squat plus sign.

She pauses again, with the realization that her lover has no name for her to scribble in abbreviation. To write something like _W.S._ seems like a childish move, even for a frivolous exercise like this, and there’s no telling who else might catch sight of the mirror anyway. Still, she can’t quite make herself erase the icon entirely.

The steam clears, and by the time they depart for the rendezvous, Natalia’s drawing, unseen and unfinished, has long since faded.

 

iii

They are caught and separated without ceremony but not without violence. Natalia is yanked away from him, literally and otherwise. The Soldier crumples to the ground at the sharp shout of a trigger word he has no memory of having heard before. When he wakes, his handlers can’t seem to shove him into the cryo chamber fast enough.

In the few short minutes he has before the cold claims him, body and mind, he raises a hand to the little glass window—the metal hand, so he can scratch something lasting—and scrawls, in the private shorthand they had developed during a long night of surveillance, _Remember her! Remember Nat…_

But the last letters dissolve into abstract markings as he falls unconscious.

When he wakes, days or weeks or months or years or decades later, the Winter Soldier stares at the strange text in front of him and does not know what to think of the slender, possibly female, handprint smudged on the outside of the glass.

 

iv

Natalia is no longer Natalia when she arrives in Odessa, but her abrupt and half-remembered escape from the region leaves her reeling with Natalia’s long-buried memories. When she recovers enough to return to the field, it’s with the certainty that he is still out there, still operational, still serving hard-eyed and cold-hearted masters—new or old, it doesn’t matter.

When she returns to eastern Europe next, or central Asia, or the Black Sea, or really anywhere that the Winter Soldier might be activated, Natasha-not-Natalia brings a palm-sized can of spray paint in the only color she has ever known as _hers_. If there is anything of him, any soul left buried in the stone-faced ghost who had set her in his sights and pulled the trigger, she thinks he’ll know it, too.

On the sides of abandoned buildings, of warehouses and ramshackle high-rises, in Cold War-remnant bunkers and on cracked new-world asphalt, she writes to him. In their secret code, the letters dripping like an ominous message all their own, she tells him, _Come back to me, come find me, dorogoy moy_.

She isn’t hard to find. Her reputation precedes her, now more than ever, especially as she stumbles into the business of publicly saving the world. After S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, Natasha-not-Natalia keeps the paint with her, just in case.

There’s no time on either trip to Sokovia to leave any secret messages. By that point, though, she wonders if—just maybe—he will come anyway, some day soon.

 

v

Much later, when the dust has settled and the paint has long since chipped away, they walk along a beach. It’s the first day in a while—a lifetime, perhaps—that offers the chance to be alone, unheard and unnoticed, at peace. The unrecorded hours are theirs, and for just this little while, they owe nothing to anyone, carry no debts, and leave their respective ledgers packed away, back in the wider world alongside the other unshakable detritus of their lives.

There’s little that needs saying; each has always understood what made the other and who they have become, together and apart. If there are questions of what they mean to each other, away from the cold and the mission and the rest, they keep such thoughts to themselves. The present tense was enough when it was all they had; it’s worth no less now.

After a while, she slips her hand from his and wanders down to the rising tide, letting the surf puddle between her toes and splash bits of foam against her pale shins. He watches her watch the shimmering sun begin to dip below the horizon. She turns back to him, beaming, and there are no questions left unanswered.

Her gaze reverts to the sunset, and he meanders toward her, pausing a few yards away to etch something into the sand with his toes. She notices, but only just as a wave sweeps up, covering the missive and his ankles.

When the water ebbs away, she can see the remnants of his writing, though they’re mostly sunk into the sand. _I love you_ , he’s written, first in English, then in Russian, then in that old bespoke shorthand. _I love you, I love you._

Another wave washes ashore, and she comes to stand next to him, the words all but gone. He snakes an arm around her waist, and her head rests on his shoulder. “Tide comes in pretty fast here, huh?” he says, a little wryly.

She runs her fingers across his chest and up to his cheek, pulling him in for a light kiss. “Don’t worry, _lyubimyi_. I got the message.”

**Author's Note:**

> [likesummerrainn](http://likesummerrainn.tumblr.com) prompted, "Bucky and Natasha writing letters that they never send each other with things they never said."
> 
> Title is from Ingrid Michaelson's "[The Chain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YqTSlvaadc)."
> 
> Thanks to [ilostmyshoe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) and [red_b_rackham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham) for beta-reading. Again. They're the best. I'm running out of ways to say as much, but it's true.


End file.
